Google’s Caffeine Updated
No, no – this is no misspelling. Caffeine is indeed a term we know well in the world of SEO. On June 8th Google launched their update to Caffeine, their web indexing system, and it’s is giving some people the jitters.
We, the Internet Managers, e-Commerce Directors, Dealers and SEO guys, creating optimal search engine results for our dealer pages, don’t like the idea of updates that require us to shifting established algorithms, which could result in a rankings change for our sites. Caffeine and other such updates are often released without warning and hence, without any preparation time.
According to the Department of Searchology, our Google Caffeine jitters should be minimal. The Department points out that Caffeine in general is NOT an algorithm update. Rankings will not be directly affected by these changes. What changes however is how fast Google can crawl through the indexed information and the amount of data that can be stored in its index at once.
How did it work before Caffeine was introduced?
- Robots, a.k.a GOOGLEBOTS, crawled sites and pulled all scraped information into the Google indexes.
- This newly indexed information was then processed through algorithms to determine which rank the pages would be rewarded based on the particular keywords.
- After these data were processed, the updated index was then pushed out to hundreds of data centers in clusters, which took approximately three months to have rankings updated.
With the newest Google Caffeine update the indexing process will push the indexed information to the data centers almost instantly. Webpage updates are at the data centers more quickly. A further advantage of Google Caffeine is the increase of the storage capability. Due to more involved webmasters and SEO firms, user-generated content has skyrocket over the years, leaving Google scrambling to index larger quantities of data. Google Caffeine is now able to index basics like a new web page or credit attributions for inbound links. The attribution model did not change with this update and Google will be able to store more information for a much longer time
Is action required?
As I stated above, Caffeine’s update is not algorithm based therefore there is no SERP benefit and at this point doesn’t require you to modify your SEO strategy. Your site updates will process and show results much faster than before. Due to the increased storage capabilities the value of smart optimizations will increase as well. Google will have a better view and idea of connectivity’s in regards to in- and out-bound links.
As it turns out, a little Caffeine is good – even for your nerves.
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